It seems that Apple are announcing some sort of “thing” this evening. According to my “Mac Evangelist” (Yes – that’s what he called himself) flatmate, it’s going to fundamentally change computing forever. Or I suppose it could just as easily be an software update. I especially liked the one that enabled copy-and-paste. That really changed everything!
That sounds rather bitter. It’s not that I don’t like Apple. I’m typing this on a Mac Mini, and the iPod Touch is a brilliant piece of kit. I just don’t care! What annoys me is the incessant hype surrounding this thing. Nobody outside of Apple even knows what it is yet!
Someone once joked that Steve Jobs could crap in a white plastic box and the “Evangelists” would queue up to hand over their money. I’m starting to believe that. I guess it shows the strength of Apple’s marketing department though.
While I was away people were often interested to learn that I studied AI, but there were a couple of times when (otherwise very intelligent) people told me they were convinced that sufficiently advanced systems could only be used to enslave/exterminate humanity. One even went so far as to compare my honours project to vivisection. She seemed appalled that I took as a compliment the suggestion that I had created a system with sophistication comparable to a thinking and feeling animal.
The critics of AI might not be so wrong though because, according to the Telegraph,
Terrorists could one day use an army of robot “suicide bombers” to attack British targets
Schneier calls it a “movie-plot threat”, but I suppose it’s good to know that someone in the Home Office is planning for the rise of the Cylons…
According to the well-respected technology journal The Sun, the Conficker worm is supposed to kill us all sometime on Wednesday.
That’s right, it’s “deadly”. Even Snow Crash didn’t kill people!
Part of me hopes it’ll do something cool, or at least interesting. (Gaining sentience, taking over the world’s nuclear weapons, experimenting with time-travel and attempting to kill the mother of the unborn future leader-of-mankind, for example) But, it’ll probably just send a lot of spam.
